David Chang rocks Oz

"This is good. This is unbelievably good." David Chang loves
noodles. Right now, he's eating a bowl of khanom jeen nam ya, the
Thai fermented rice vermicelli with fish curry sauce, basil and
mustard pickles, at Sydney's Spice I Am. "You've had Thai food in America,
right?" he asks between bites. "You must just shake your head,
like, what the f***?" A week into Chang's first visit to Australia,
courtesy of the Melbourne
Food & Wine Festival, and he's clocked some serious flying
hours at out-there restaurants and holes-in-the-wall alike. "This
is all super-fantastic," he says, carving his way through nam khao
tod, som tum, hoy tod, yum pla krob and more. "If this was in New
York, there'd be 200 people outside."

To equal the culinary balance of trade, he has brought a taste
of his Manhattan Momofuku restaurants (the Lower East Side's
Momofuku Noodle Bar, Momofuku Ssäm Bar, Momofuku Ko and the newly
opened Má Pêche, in Midtown). The dinner he and Momofuku Ko chef
Peter Serpico gave at Cumulus Inc
had the Melbourne food world scrambling for tickets, and the dinner
he hosted in Sydney, with local chef Dan Hong and his team covering
Momofuku classics at Lotus, was likewise
a sold-out smash. Chang made enough of an impression that Cumulus's
pork strap is now listed on the menu with miso-buttered leeks and
"Chang's kimchi", while Lotus owner Justin Hemmes was inspired to
draw up plans for a Momofuku-esque restaurant of his own, with Hong
at the helm, in Sydney.

Much as Chang enjoyed the dinners, as well as the likes of Quay,
Tetsuya's, Attica and Embrasse, the restaurant he's rushing to tell
his friends about is not yet garlanded with accolades nor well
known outside Melbourne. "The single best thing I've had to eat in
my time in Australia is the fried eggplant at Dainty Sichuan," he says. "They fry it, I think
they roll it in sugar and fry it again, and then they toss it in
chilli madness." Chang is far from a stranger to Asian food, but
the food at the South Yarra favourite, he says, was better than at
similar restaurants he'd visited in China because of the quality of
produce. "Their version of chopped-up chicken in a pile of chillies
is the best I've ever had, and the tofu dishes were amazing, the
silken tofu with preserved egg - so subtle." Serpico - a famously
tough cookie - was equally impressed. "He said this was one of the
top five meals of his life."

Chang's other adventures in Australian eating led him to Pho Chu
The on Victoria Street, Richmond, for "one of the best bowls of pho
I have ever had". Never one to do things by half-measures, he had
two bowls on his first visit and three when he came back for a
second round. "We don't have anything like that in New York."
Melbourne also introduced Chang to the possibilities of Greek food.
"I'd never eaten in a Greek restaurant before. You go to a diner in
America and you get Greek salad or souvlaki or all that s***, but
you never have Greek-Greek food, so Hellenic
Republic was delicious. Lots of lamb, and the saganaki was
fantastic."

Cumulus Inc was, to his mind, the most Australian of the
restaurants he visited. "I love the fact that they have an
extensive oyster selection, I love the fact that they work with
local farmers, I love that pork strap. I'm wary of tuna tartare,
but theirs is f***in' righteous." Working in the kitchen,
meanwhile, Chang was interested in the unfamiliar cuts of meat on
the menu. "When we did the Momofuku dinner, we switched the pork
belly for the pork strap that they use. I wanted to try something
new on the buns. It was a cut I'd never thought about using but
it's beautiful because if you cook it sous vide you have a layer of
fat, tenderness and, more importantly, this fantastic skin."

The discrepancy between the nightlife in Melbourne and Sydney
also piqued Chang's interest. "Melbourne has this great bar scene,
but the bars in Sydney are all glitzy and glam. Why aren't there
more bars like Gerald's in Sydney? Pete Serpico tried hula-hooping
there. I was there with Massimo
Bottura, watching a pretty girl dance on the bar while people
hula-hooped on the street, and I thought, this is sort of like
being on mescaline. And Siglo? That place is dangerous."

"Infatuated" with Australia, Chang says we can expect to see
more of him. "I've travelled a lot with Serpico, and we both think
this is a place we could move to. That's the highest praise Serpico
could give to anything." Just don't expect him to go entirely
native. "I'd describe Vegemite as awful," he says. "I was thinking
about making a dashi out of Marmite, but Vegemite? Never."